Bearing in mind that both MPC and PsyTEL AAC are 'closed' codecs, at least from the encoder standpoint, and that PsyTEL, unless I am mistaken is not even meant to be in 'free' circulation, wouldn't there be some mileage in some of the brains involved in the tuning of Lame diverting the attention to FAAC?

I realise that binary distribution of FAAC is 'verboten' in the patent context, but the source is freely available and compiles very readily with MinGW32 and other free compilers.

Are there any points I am missing here other than the lack of binary distrubtions? Although, that does not seem to preclude other patent/copyright bound codecs finding there way into distribution through the back door!!

Anybody any views on this? I applaud all the efforts in relation to Lame improvements, it would just be nice to see similar efforts being put into emerging technologies. Before anyone asks, I don't have either the degree of programming skills required, nor the knowledge of audio compression techniques, otherwise I'd be there.

I have wondered this as well. Why does NOBODY seem interested in working on tuning FAAC? Even Ivan, for that matter? Obviously, he could lend a GREAT DEAL of expertise in this matter. He relies on FAAD a great deal, perhaps he could contribute something back to Menno's encoder. I've never really been clear on PsyTEL's business plan, but surely FAAC, even if it's well tuned, wouldn't pose a real threat to steal any corporate customers since they would have to scrounge around for binaries and wouldn't really have ANY tech support.

Originally posted by layer3maniac It's not any harder to get binaries of aac encoders than it is mp3 encoders like Lame and Blade.

This most certainly is not the case. It is much easier to get binaries of LAME than it is to get binaries of AAC encoders. For one, the binaries of AAC are certainly illegal and will be taken down immediately if they are found out. With LAME there have been websites established for a long time, well known, which have everything necessary. As Ivan said, Fhg doesn't really care about LAME binaries. Dolby does care about AAC binaries.

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And couldn't the exact same arguments about fairness to the opensource community be made against improving Lame, Vorbis, Linux or ANY opensource project for that matter? When Monty incorperates wavelets into Vorbis, couldn't commercial developers just study the code and utilize the technology?

No to the first question. Because these projects are not commercial by nature. AAC is commercial by nature and so is PsyTEL. It is a much more competitive market and it is not meant for the end user. LAME and Vorbis were never started for the purpose of being marketed commercially, so the situation is totally irrelevant in those cases.

In the case of at least Vorbis, they are not concerned with companies utilizing their technology, this is why it ships with a BSD license instead of a GPL license.

Two totally different situations you have there that cannot be directly related to eachother.

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When Menno said:

[...]

I believed him. I accept the fact that you don't think it's in your best interest to help improve the quality, even though I don't fully understand it. But what about all the opensource Lame people? I also think that software patents in general, and especially those based on ISO standards, are due for a big court battle someday. That is - if they don't expire first...

For the record I can't see myself working on AAC as it currently exists. If I ever stop working on LAME (which with all things considered will likely happen sooner rather than later) I'll move directly to working on Vorbis. This would be the wisest choice for nearly anyone IMO.

I cannot see a valid argument for extensively working on a "free" AAC encoder and I'm not sure I can see anyone coming up with one. The technology is heavily restricted and a free implementation is under constant legal threat [b]now. Vorbis, while you may still believe that it will someday have legal issues (without basis), does not suffer from this currently. Furthermore, binaries are easily accessible, as is the code, and the quality is MUCH higher than that of FAAC already. Add to that the fact that Vorbis is being incorporated into many end user programs and that it will likely be gaining hardware support soon.

So really.. what advantage at all does a free open source AAC project offer to the end user (research aside)? I'd really like to see some convincing arguments for this because I can't think of any.